I've wanted to see the 2002 Sam Rockwell vehicle Confessions of a Dangerous Mind since about the time it came out, but never got around to it until now. If I were going to do a tweet-review of this, it would be "Way darker than I expected; don't watch it if you're in a misanthropic mood."
Imagine Time Chasers if its plot entailed not time travel but alligator smuggling, if its cast had far less investment in what they were doing, if the chase scenes were even more cheap and stupid, and if it induced Z-grade celebrity actors to somehow embarrass themselves—in this case, Michael Berryman (Captain Rixx from the TNG episode "Conspiracy"), Antonio Fargas (TV's Huggy Bear), and Joe Estevez, who of course is reason I watched this.
Moreover, I found Gravity compelling and realistic enough that other sci-fi thrillers will hereafter have a high standard of realism to live up to. This is why I'm reluctant to see Ghosts of Mars even though I know I should for several reasons.
But back to Europa Report. I'm pleased to…um…report that it's not ridiculous. It's got some structural problems, and many of its characters are ill-defined, but I found it engrossing and tense.
And our leads? The oft-confused Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. This movie's actually a helpful mnemonic for those of you who have trouble remembering which is which: who'd make a better head-in-the-clouds neurologist vs. who'd make a better corporate shark?
Pullman is the neurologist, Rex, whose livelihood is threatened by shady goings-on involving his old college buddy turned plutocrat, Jim (Paxton). Soon, Rex's very sanity is on the line; he begins to experience hallucinations after agreeing to perform experimental brain surgery on a company drone (Cort) who knows too much.
Indeed, it's a movie of its moment, particularly so if you're an astronomer or an astronaut, I'd imagine. The narrative's antagonist is the Kessler effect—the phenomenon of space debris crashing into other space debris and causing a cascade reaction as tiny, superfast pieces effectively multiply themselves. Part of me was hoping that, following the harrowing climax, the survivor(s) would address a session of Congress about the urgency of cleaning up our way-too-polluted orbital space. But that would have been preachy and lame, which is why I wasn't disappointed when it didn't happen.
As the title implies, the protagonist cop (Laurence Fishburne) goes deep undercover to try and bring down a chain of coke dealers. Along the way he partners up with a lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) working for one of his targets, and the lines between crime and justice begin to blur, as they are oft wont to do. Before long he's facing down Latin American druglords and corrupt senators, though sadly without any McBain-esque one-liners or defenestrations.
There must be some cosmic significance to the fact that Netflix sent me The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) just in time for me to watch it late yesterday, around the time that the latest, and gobsmackingest, NSA revelations came to light. It's just as well that I wasn't aware of the latter until this morning, otherwise I would've been curled up and sobbing midway through the movie.
The other side of that view is just as valid: that effective movies with unusual structure get noticed for it. Pulp Fiction is an obvious example, and Side Effects is too, but not in the same way. Not only does Side Effects have structural weirdness of a different flavor (its chronology is linear), but the weirdness it has exists for a very good reason, as opposed to Pulp Fiction's showier, more indulgent structure.
And now, another one from my "I Put It Off So Long that It's Probably a Little Past Its Freshness Date" movie pile.
The prospective viewer should know that Dark City is not so much a noir film (despite its visual palette) as it is a mysterious sci-fi/fantasy film. That sentence probably gives away too much, but a fan of noir who dislikes films that delve too deeply into the realm of the fantastical will be disappointed with Dark City. However, the inverse is also true; I'm only mildly fond of noir but I liked Dark City more than either true noir or Dark City-esque films like The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix.
Structurally, the film reveals just enough at just the right times to maintain the right balance of interest and confusion. Had it tried to be more opaque—for example, had it omitted the shot of the weird creature during one of the early chase scenes—it might have kept me from guessing as much about the explanation as I did, but it also might have turned out too plodding.
Sometimes you notice an unexpected similarity between two very different works that you happen to consume around the same time; when I re-watched Sneakers recently, I had just finished reading Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work, a once-controversial book from the mid-'90s concerning inevitable changes in the world's economies as a result of ever-more-efficient automation. (Short summary: most people will lose their jobs, and we have to move beyond the entire notion of jobs ASAP, or huge and enduring economic disaster will ensue.) I'm no economist and I rarely read this sort of thing, but the book was tough to put down in spite of its often encyclopedic feel—largely because I like to think about all the ways in which the world has changed since recent technologies came along. Rifkin only mentions the Internet once, yet his book, remarkably, isn't very dated at all. In much the same way, and for some of the same reasons, 1992's Sneakers isn't as dated as I feared it would prove to be when I re-watched it. I guess we have Wikileaks and Anonymous to thank for that—or maybe they have movies like this to thank for their own conception.
I haven't yet seen any of the other Best Picture nominees for the recent Oscars, so maybe they're all kind of lackluster, but I find it slightly strange that Argo won.
I say "slightly" because it does relive a tense historical moment that would be well-remembered by Academy voters, and it does celebrate the power of Hollywood to make a difference in the real world. So maybe it's not so strange.
Yet Argo feels dry and workmanlike compared with other films of its type. I may have been spoiled in a sense, because years ago I read the article on which the screenplay was based. But considering the setting, it should've felt more thrilling than it did.
Not that it was entirely free of thrills. A lot of credit goes to the actors playing Argo's "house guests," escapees from the stormed U.S. embassy; their edginess is continually palpable, and to the script's credit, Ben Affleck's stoic CIA character handles their anxiety with a minimum of cliché.
Affleck deserves credit too. The excellent cast manages to make their characters feel real, as historical dramas require, and Affleck does it as well as the more seasoned screen standbys here (Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and the indispensable Alan Arkin).
Too many thrillers just aren't very thrilling. Usually it's because they rely on big action setpieces, cheap plot devices, or Morgan Freeman to twist our arms into caring about what's happening, and as a result we don't care enough.
In the first half-hour or so of Headhunters, a stylish Norwegian thriller, I found myself reflecting on this, poised as I was quite close to the edge of my seat. "Here is a protagonist who, while clearly competent, isn't especially likable, and yet I care about what's happening," I said to myself, "not to mention what is sure to happen when the shit hits the fan. I wonder why I'm so engrossed, when so many similar films have failed to engage me much."
